Re: "One-cell" language?

On Mon, 13 Oct 2014, Chris Angelico wrote:

> The Pike manual says that, like Scheme, Pike is a "one-cell" language.
>
> http://pike.lysator.liu.se/generated/manual/ref/chapter_1.html#3
>
> What does this actually mean? I've poked around on Google without
> success; and in fact most of the hits for the quoted string "one-cell
> language" are actually various copies of the Pike docs... including
> one newsgroup thread dating back to 1997, in which the text appeared
> unchanged, so this has obviously been around for a while! Has the term
> fallen into disuse perhaps?

The mention of Scheme hints at that it refers to one of the differences 
between Scheme and other dialects of LISP.

In traditional LISP dialects like InterLISP and CommonLISP symbols were 
bound to property lists ie a symbol could hold multiple values 
concurrently (multi-cell LISP).

See eg https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/cltl/clm/node108.html

In more modern dialects like eg Scheme symbols are bound directly to 
values (single-cell LISP).

 	/grubba
-- 
Henrik Grubbström					[email protected]
Roxen Internet Software AB